Who are the Poles? The 1931 census recorded the total population of Poland as 32,000,000. Of these, 22,000,000 were ethnic Poles; 4,500,000 were Ukrainians; 3,000,000 were Jews; 1,000,000 were Belorussians; 750,000 were Germans; and the remainder were classified as ‘locals’. These were all Polish citizens and will be considered as such throughout this book. At times it will be necessary to point out the ethnicity of certain Poles. For example, the treachery of the ethnic German Polish citizens; the civil war against ethnic Poles waged by the ethnic Ukrainian Polish citizens; and the debates over which pre-war Polish citizens the Soviet authorities would permit to join the Polish Army in the Soviet Union. In general the term Jew has been used as a shorthand for Polish Jew, especially in the chapter on the Holocaust. Modern Poland, after the extermination of the Jews and the post-war redrawing of its frontiers, is a homogeneous country, 97 per cent ethnic Polish. But during the period covered by this book Poland’s population was ethnically heterogeneous and many of her citizens from the national minorities felt themselves to be Polish citizens and were prepared to fight and die under the Polish flag. The Polish war cemetery at Monte Cassino demonstrates this: in one corner there are crooked crosses marking the graves of those Poles of Uniate or Eastern Orthodox faith and, diametrically opposite, the graves of Polish Jews, marked by a Star of David.
Where is Poland? For the purposes of this book ‘Poland’ is taken to represent the territory of the pre-war Second Polish Republic. Because of Poland’s post-war move to the west the names of certain cities have since changed. For example, the Polish city of Stanisławów is now the city of Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, and the city of Breslau, formerly in Germany, is now Wrocław in Poland. The first mention of each place where the name has changed has the modern name in round brackets.
The shifting of the Polish frontiers and the alteration to the composition of Poland’s population have occasionally made the provision of accurate statistics extremely difficult. Where there are different statistics, the debates over the numbers have been summarised.